As long as you have a live website that’s all that’s important, right?

Maybe your website was developed a few years ago and you had a lot of input into the initial design process, you may still love the design and it’s hard to let go. But what do your clients and prospects think? What is their experience with your website? How user-friendly it is? Is it easy to find information when they are using a mobile device? Like all technologies, the Internet is always evolving – it’s important to ensure your online presence remains relevant by paying attention to how your site is performing.

Your website represents your business to an enormous audience. When a client walks in the front door of the office you want to make a great impression right? You take care to ensure it looks clean, tidy and respectable – so why should your website be any different. Keeping it up to date is important not just visually but technologically too. As monitors get bigger and more people are searching on mobile devices you want to make sure your website is built to provide people on all devices the best experience.

Below are some tell-tale signs that your website is outdated:

Your website doesn’t utilize screen space well

Many years ago websites were designed to fit common monitor sizes of the time which usually were substantially smaller than what we see in a typical office of home computer set up these days. Even with these smaller screens a common practice was to fit all the content “above the fold”. You may have heard this term relating to having all or the bulk of the website within the top of the screen without having to scroll down. This outdated practice typically means that your site will potentially appear very small and narrow with a lot of redundant screen space. The text may be very small and hard to read and the site may appear to be cluttered or cramped. With the technology and trend changes within the last 6 years its common to scroll down to find information on the home page, backed with an intuitive navigation and clear calls to action and featured content.

Your website doesn’t reflect your branding and marketing

A lot changes over time and so does a company’s marketing and branding, does your website design reflect those changes? If your website looks and feels outdated it might be an indication that it’s time to update your website, you want your potential clients to visit a website that visually represents your company’s professionalism and vision.

Your website doesn’t look good on a mobile device

Your website is your most important online marketing and communication tool, so it’s essential that clients and prospects get the best possible user experience from all of their devices. Internet usage on mobile devices has grown rapidly over the last six years and has now overtaken desktop browsing as the most used digital platform – meaning clients and prospects will be able to access all of your website content and information from any device they are using. So instead of creating separate websites for various devices, your responsive website rearranges itself to fit the screen size it’s loaded on. A mobile-friendly (‘responsive’) website will respond to the screen size of the device it is viewed on – so it can utilize the whole screen space, allowing the site to adjust to fit common screen sizes including mobile device screens.

Your website uses Flash

Several years ago the only way to get animations on your website, from advertisements to rotating images was to use a technology called “Flash”. Some of the issues with Flash was the content inside a Flash file wasn’t indexable by search engines and also caused performance issues on mobile devices and potential security issues. These days all the modern browsers on desktop and mobile devices don’t support Flash and older websites will now show an error where the Flash files were used, with a modern built website Flash is replaced using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript or a combination of all three.

If you think some or all of the above signs apply to your website or you’re not sure and would like us to provide you with some professional advice from a web design team with over 10 years’ experience each in the web design industry please get in contact with us today.

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